


Problem Sleuth's Great Pantsventure

by Gray_Days



Category: Homestuck, Problem Sleuth (Webcomic)
Genre: Flagrant Buffoonery, Gen, Unfortunate Implications
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-01 09:06:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18332951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/pseuds/Gray_Days
Summary: Wherein our hero gets himself into a fix, and gets out of it again through deft application of his typical brand of ingenuity.By the seat of his pants, if you will.





	Problem Sleuth's Great Pantsventure

**Author's Note:**

> It was recently brought to my attention that I should probably post my older writing somewhere that people can actually read it, so here's this.
> 
> Originally written February 2014, as far as Dropbox will tell me. (I will use AO3's backdating function when I'm dead. Or once there's a reasonable chance of anyone seeing a newly-posted work without searching by most recent, whichever comes first.)

He always seems to find himself in warehouses. This time it's for a client interested in proving that their supplier is systematically distributing shoddy and defective goods at prices defective only in that they're indistinguishable from the normal inflated ones. What Problem Sleuth is supposed to do is confirm that they didn't just get a bad batch or two, but that the seller is purposely shortweighting his client and the rest of their customers for the sake of profit.

He raises his flashlight again and picks at the label on the crate in front of him. This one's crown moldings, according to the stamp. He has no idea what a crown molding is. When he slides the crate off the steel shelf and to the floor with a faint scraping, then pops the nails out of the lid, he finds that it's pieces of sanded wood carved with a nice bevel, stacked and of uniform length. He has no idea how to test if a crown molding is defective. Fault lines? Should he stick a chisel in one of the pieces and see how easy it splits?

He looks around at the shelves surrounding him. This section's all crown moldings (the phrase is starting to become an even more meaningless collection of sounds the more it loops in his head). Further on he spots a new set of labels that puzzle him until he opens one of the crates up and figures out that "3in stl dblthread flat - 100x 80ct" refers to neatly gridded cardboard cases of screws that gleam dully silver in the flashlight's beam.

Another light picks up the gleam, half-blocked by his shoulder. Sleuth freezes and looks up, at the same time that the figure made near-invisible by the light in his face says, "What are you—"

Sleuth bolts the opposite way down the aisle, thanking whatever fortune watches over hapless PIs for the instinctual tendency to ask stupid questions instead of just attacking an obvious intruder. His foot catches on the lid of the crown-moldings crate and spins it clattering over the concrete floor ahead of him while he deals with the sudden challenge of (crap) not falling or twisting his knee. He drops his flashlight righting himself ( _crap_ — that's going to come out of his pocket, if tonight doesn't come out of his hide), coming so low before he does that his fingers scrape the concrete. The chrome-barrel rolls under a set of shelves as the guard behind him yells, "Hey!"

He reaches an intersection, starts to turn left, and sees another flashlight coming from that direction. He reverses and dashes helter-skelter down the aisle to the right.

There's more yelling behind him. A hundred feet ahead there's the dim grey-blue light of a window over a half-height set of shelves, eight or ten feet up. Sleuth puts on a burst of speed, breathing raggedly. He can feel the stitch starting under his ribs, but he's used to running and it'll take a few hundred more yards before it really hits.

He reaches the shelves and propels himself up, landing on his hands on the first row of crates to vault up to the next, palms stinging with the impact. That takes up the rest of his surplus momentum and he's forced to clamber to the top of the third row without any assistance from his sprint. The window at the top is closed. Sleuth plunges his hand into his coat for his prybar to break it with before he notices the latch at the base, and opts to take the path of least defacement. If only in consideration of the future integrity of _his_ face.

There's a moment of resistance; then the latch rotates the rest of the way with an almost airy ease and the window swings into the warehouse and directly at Problem Sleuth, knocking him half off his perch as he falls flat in an attempt to avoid it.

A tug on his ankle nearly pulls him off the rest of the way. Sleuth grabs the top of the crate to keep from being dislodged, kicking back. The hand loses its grip on his ankle and catches his pant leg instead. A glimpse through the thin gap between his armpit and the crate shows one of the guards clinging to the shelf he's standing on, trying to haul him down with her free hand. Her partner's standing farther back, trying to track with his pistol but unable to get a clear shot with his colleague in the way. Sleuth kicks again, more desperately this time, catching her a glancing blow to the face. Her grip loosens and he pulls himself up again before she catches him around the thighs and his chest slams back into the crate's edge with a grunt that takes all the rest of his meagre air with it.

He wriggles, _definitely_ desperately now as she does her best to climb up his legs, then takes a stupid gamble and undoes his belt, yanking the tail to the left to free it from the buckle and hard to the right again to let it slip through. The guard hanging from his legs falls to the floor with an impact that audibly blows the air out of her body, holding nothing but Problem Sleuth's pants and undone belt. Sleuth scrambles pantsless to the top of the crate again and dives out the now-open window, rolling badly when he lands on the wharf and fetching up a foot from a mooring post.

There's gravel digging into his shoulder, splinters in the back of his neck, and his legs are cold. Sleuth groans and pushes himself up, taking to his heels again with gravel scraping under his feet and making him skid. More yelling converges around the warehouse behind him.

He runs until the stitch under his ribs makes it impossible to run any more, then ducks into the nearest building without looking to see what it is. He turns around, breathing in hitching gasps, to see a woman at the counter of what he now recognizes to be a Dersite restaurant. —Girl, he amends mentally. She's adult-sized, shell scuffed by the desert and with a small white scar under one eye, but her carapace still has that certain kind of sheen and translucency that disappears with age, and there are densely-clustered growth marks around her joints that mark her as natural-born. She watches him suspiciously as the door whispers closed.

"Do you," he asks, gulping to catch his breath, "have a back door? I need to use it."

She continues to stare at him.

"I can pay," he adds, reaching into his coat for the crumpled concretion of small bills he keeps there, at which point his nose almost hits the double barrels of the shotgun suddenly pointing at him from across the counter.

Sleuth glances down and takes in his bare legs, belted trenchcoat, and the hand holding his lapel open so he can reach inside. "Ah," he says. He pulls his hand out and lets his coat fall closed, then backs up with his hands over his head. The shotgun follows him.

"I'm sorry about this. There's been a lot of confusion today."

"I'm calling the police," she says flatly.

"You know, I don't blame you," Sleuth replies.

"Mom!" she calls back into the kitchen, without looking away from him. Sleuth rests his hands on the back of his head, starting to shiver a little from the exertion and the cold air on his legs. They have fans in here, rotating in each corner and against the wall.

Another Dersite, whom he deduces to be the girl's mom, pokes her head out into the front and immediately pulls it back with a small gasp. Her daughter seems less bothered, still watching Sleuth with the shotgun resting on the counter and her finger by the trigger. "Mom, can you call the police?"

"I'm really very sorry about this," Sleuth apologizes again.

The girl's mom says something through the door, of which Sleuth can make out "shoot him" in what might be an interrogative tone.

"I'm not going to shoot him yet, mom. He's just a pervert, he's not going to steal anything."

"Actually," Sleuth ventures again, wincing as her attention swings back over to him, "about that, I've actually just been attacked, and they took my pants."

"Really," she says, sounding bored.

"Really," he replies, sounding as honest as he can, which is usually very but for some reason seems to be coming off as kind of strained today. "I had to jump out a window to get away. One of them tried to shoot me."

Her eyes track over the scuffs on his coat and his shell, the gravel dust greying his shoes, and the sweat beginning to dry in the fans' air. "Where was this?"

"What?"

She gestures with a slight motion of the shotgun. "That you got attacked."

"Oh, um. The wharves."

She drums her fingers on the stock, _rat-a-tat-tat._ "That's nearly half a mile."

"It's more like a quarter mile," he manages.

"You think they followed you all this way? And you would've gotten us in trouble if they'd seen you come in here."

"Last I noticed they were, but I guess maybe I lost them. I really am sorry about that," he adds again.

"Hmm." She drums her fingers on the stock again, and Sleuth lets his hands relax a little behind his head, breathing more easily. "You tell a good story, at least. There's a door out back of the kitchen."

He slowly takes his hands down. "Your mom won't hit me with a frying pan or something, will she?"

"Nah. The phone's in the office." She bends under the counter for a second and tosses something at Sleuth, who catches it in surprise before he registers it coming. It's a white server's apron with ditzy yellow flowers printed on it. He folds it up hesitantly. "I always hated that thing, but it might help. You know, with your pants issue."

"Thank you," he says, edging toward the counter and the kitchen door behind it. "If there's anything I can do—"

She shrugs. "Nah. I'll tell the police some crazy pervert came in and ran out again before I could shoot him. It'll keep my mom happy and they'll be here in case your criminals come around."

"Right," he says. Sleuth edges around the door and slips through it into the kitchen, navigating between hanging pots and pans and industrial stovetops. The apron manages to wrap around his waist under the coat enough to make a passable skirt. He cinches the strings tight to keep it from slipping down and escapes out into the grease-scented alley outside.

**Author's Note:**

> As far as I can remember, you can't technically prove any of the characters in Problem Sleuth are wearing pants at any given point, and I think that's beautiful.


End file.
